The Pollution Within
The Pollution Within: ‘Mama, why does this tomato sauce taste like plastic?’
‘Phthalates!’ (Pronounced THAL-ates) ‘are the cause of that plastic taste in food’ I tell my four year old daughter. In this case, the tomato sauce bottle contains phthalates.
What are phthalates?
Phthalates are chemicals used as
plasticizers (added to
plastics to increase their flexibility, transparency, durability, and longevity). They are also used in
enteric coatings of pharmaceutical drugs and nutritional supplements,
lubricants, binders,
emulsifying agents, and suspending agents. End applications include adhesives and glues, building materials, detergents, packaging, children's toys,
modeling clay, waxes,
paints, printing inks, food containers, textiles, and personal care products (perfume, eye shadow, moisturizer, nail polish, liquid soap, and hair spray).
They are everywhere and eventually find their way into our bodies. This is particularly concerning because phthalates disrupt our endocrine system; are directly linked to asthma and other respiratory problems, rhinitis and eczema; produce reproductive and genital defects; premature birth and early onset of puberty; lower sperm counts; and are risk factors for testicular cancer. Biomonitoring studies reveal that phthalates are in the bodies of virtually everyone tested.
This is why making deliberate consumer choices can fundamentally effect the toxic chemical levels in our bodies, and hence our health and wellbeing. Yet everyday, particularly as parents, we butt up against the dilemma’s of trying to raise healthy children in a world that produces more than 100,000 chemicals every year annum most of which are untested. My tomato sauce dilemma is a good example of this. You see… on Sunday nights, my kids and I often make hot chips together. We slice organic potato, sweet potato, kumara, and pumpkin, fry it in coconut oil and dip it into tomato sauce. I wish I could say the sauce was home-made, but most of the time it’s not. One particular Sunday I made a last minute dash down to the wholefoods market to buy a bottle of tomato sauce, and this is what I found:
c The organic tomato sauce was in a plastic bottle.
c The non-organic, but locally grown and locally made tomato sauce was also in a plastic bottle
c Then there was the conventional tomato sauce in a glass bottle.
What to do? The question of the day was to either subject my family, including my two little blond head beauties, to a commercial brand tomato sauce, which contained pesticides (and probably a range of preservatives and refined sugars) but no plasticizer chemicals; a product with lower amounts of pesticides, by virtue of being locally made and easier on carbon emissions, but contained plasticizer chemicals; or the a product with no pesticides, or food additives, but again contained plasticizer chemicals. I stood there suffocating in tomato sauce-choice paralysis.
In the end, I headed to the checkout with the organic tomato sauce choosing to limit my families’ pesticide intake that day. But in the back of my mind, I knew the health impact of phthalates, and as I drove home I reflected on how much easier it would be to simply have glass-bottled, organically and locally grown and manufactured tomato sauce, and how much this would prevent any similar supermarket dilemma’s in the future. But whilst making deliberate consumer choices can fundamentally effect the levels of toxic chemical levels in our bodies, only government legislative changes can solve these consumer dilemma’s. Be that limiting packaging with plasticizing chemicals such as phthalates, pesticide use, food additive regulation, or by bolstering the production of local food. Join us in our endeavor to raise healthy children in a toxic world.
Dr Sarah Lantz (PhD) is a research fellow at the University of Queensland, mother, author of the bestselling book Chemical Free Kids: Raising Healthy Children in a Toxic World and all round chemical conscious parenting nut. Visit her blog for latest health updates www.nontoxsoapbox.com or go to www.chemicalfreeparenting.com
